Speaking

I’ve also given a number of talks about technology topics from time to time to different groups. Here’s a few of them that you can find publicly.

Your Company Will Be Different Next Year

This is a talk I originally put together for DevOpsDays Des Moines. The talk covers some of the things that we learned as an organization moving to the public cloud,

and a few of the things that I learned as a leader; both in terms of technology and people. A later version of this talk was also presented at the Iowa Tech Summit sponsored by the Technology Association of Iowa.

Test Driving Your Infrastructure

This is not a talk I put together or presented, but this is one that I encouraged my team to submit. The team I lead through the AWS migration project (including Jessie and Jesus) came up with some novel approaches to a process for regression testing a cloud infrastructure to ensure that as we continued to develop and evolve our environment that we could be confident that the changes we introduced did not impact the operation of other systems. The solution the team came up with – testing a combination of Terraform and Puppet deploys with ServerSpec and a few other tools – was presented at PuppetConf in 2017. While the talk / paper is not “mine”, it’s one of the presentations I’m proudest of.

Managing Multiple Environments with Puppet

Back in 2015, r10k and the (then new) Puppet environments were picking up steam. I spent some time in Chicago and Minneapolis talking about how to solve those tricky problems of having a single puppetmaster control (and report on!) multiple environments using Puppet Open Source and r10k. Here is a recording of my talk in Chicago:

First Steps: OATS and Oracle OpenScript

I recorded this one quite awhile ago as a demo of using Oracle OpenScript and OATS (Oracle Application Testing Suite) to write some basic software tests. I didn’t think many people would watch this, but as of this writing the video has over 10,000 views.

This demo has two rather unusual things about it:

I recorded this some time ago while working as a consultant that had an Oracle partnership. I’ve since lost access to even download OATS and haven’t used the tool in well over six years. Although I appreciate the contacts I’ve received, I’m not the best person to build your expertise in the tool.

A quick look at the video seems to indicate that I recorded a demo using Windows 7, much to my surprise years later.